My husband’s nuts.

I went in to the den and discovered him and a co-worker, sitting glaze-eyed, watching TV. They had the sound turned off, and a Secret Chiefs 3 album plugged in. This is a fairly dark, brooding instrumental sound, fine and good.

However, they were watching what I’d been watching a few minutes prior, which was “Amazing Animal Videos” on Animal Planet, which is one of those clip shows where they show you dogs befriended by ducks and kittens being rescued from thirty foot wells.

The result was strangely captivating. Having a grim, fraught background score can turn an apparently happy scene of deer frolicking in the meadows with sheep nerve-wracking. You’re waiting for the mushroom cloud to go up. And the bits where they rescue dogs from ice floes, and kittens from wells, without the relentlessly upbeat narration and with this dark music, becomes this horribly grim scene of men digging ditches and pulling wriggling, half-dead furry grubs from the earth, then slapping cylindrical masks over their faces. You expect it to be titled “The Dark Harvest,” possibly in German. The crappy film quality of most of these shots makes it even worst. A discussion of what I think was the training of collies came out looking like a post-apocalyptic Lassie flick. A man falls down. The dog nuzzles him, runs around like a lunatic. The dog gets a woman. The woman comes over to the fallen man, laughs silently and uproariously, pets the dog lavishly. Rescue dog training, or one madwoman’s plan to off her husband, carried out by her diabolical (and obviously spastic) familiar?

Creeeeeepy.

(Yes, this is how we amuse ourselves when the Warcraft server is down.)